7 ms·
Inclusive Sans: Text font designed for accessibility and readability
- Fauntleroy 3y agoThis typeface bears more than a passing resemblance to Circular, whose owner is known for litigating unauthorized usage. I'm concerned this will become a problem for Inclusive Sans or its users.
- wizzwizz4 3y agoTypefaces are not protected by intellectual property law. Fonts, as computer software, are, but it should be easy to show that Inclusive Sans is a completely different program. I wouldn't worry about it, personally.
- tzmlab 3y agoAnother great accessible font – Atkinson Hyperlegible [0] [0] - https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont
- rob74 3y agoActually I like that one better! For instance, Inclusive Sans boasts about its "clear distinction between I [uppercase i], l [lowercase L] and 1", but the lowercase L is just a vertical bar, so might as well be mistaken for an I if there is no I to compare it to. In Atkinson Hyperlegible, the lowercase L has a slight "tail" which helps distinguish it - and the serifs on the uppercase i feel a bit less jarring.
- kibwen 3y agoAgreed, the font has a lot of playful character without giving away that it was designed for a specific functional purpose. And it looks like it's freely licensed as well, so not only is it free to use, but it's also free to ship alongside things. However, note that it does feature mirrored "b" and "d", which can be difficult to distinguish for people with dyslexia.
- rob74 3y agoThat's probably because they focus on people with low vision - but yeah, they could have added the same "tail" which the lowercase L has to the lowercase D too, that wouldn't have felt out of place...
- extra88 3y agoAtkinson Hyperlegible does have a tail on the 'd' but it's much more subtle than the one on the 'l'. As mentioned, its main priority is low vision, not dyslexia.
- jszymborski 3y agoIt is a bit weird that Inclusive Sans' lower case L doesn't have a tail considering this font is very "tail-forward" for lack of a better word. The thing that irks me the most about Atkinson Hyperlegible is that there is no medium weight and the bold weight is way too heavy for many applications. I also just kinda like the way Inclusive Sans looks more, but the Atkinson letterforms are definitely easily identified even when blurred.
- geraldwhen 3y agoEasily a superior font.
- mikae1 3y agoAnd Lexend[1][2]. [1] https://www.lexend.com https://www.lexend.com [2] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lexend https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lexend
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoAnything in monospace?
- microflash 3y agoJetBrains Mono? https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/
- wittjeff 3y agoI talked to someone from BI last week at a conference, who said that they're working on a monospace version.
- Etheryte 3y agoAny font that's designed for accessibility should always run an actual study to measure whether they managed to hit their mark or not. There's countless fonts out there designed to ameliorate dyslexia and other similar conditions that are in practice actually worse than a regular font, despite best intentions. This is something you can measure, you don't have to guess.
- mikae1 3y ago> Any font that's designed for accessibility should always run an actual study to measure whether they actually hit their mark or not. https://www.lexend.com/ https://www.lexend.com/
- RobotToaster 3y agoWhy does it want my e-mail? It doesn't seem very inclusive to require a signup just to download a font. Also no information on the licence that I could see.
- echoangle 3y agoIt’s available on google fonts.
- RobotToaster 3y agoThanks, I just saw the link further down this thread. Weird it's not on their website, but it seems to be just a case of poor communication rather than anything nefarious.
- jcotton42 3y agoIt is not a good sign that the first thing on that site is an eye-searing white-on-red banner.
- nolongerthere 3y agoDid anyone else find the green background and the white text clash in a way that made it difficult to read? I found that ironic given the article.
- kps 3y agoNot because of the hue, but because the page doesn't respect `prefers-color-scheme`, which makes it hard to take any claim of ‘accessibility’ seriously. Edit: nor `prefers-reduced-motion`, neither.
- ppbjj 3y agoOh, come on. They're using Squarespace. Maybe complain about the state of WYSIWYG editors before dismissing someone's work.
- Brian_K_White 3y agoIt doesn't matter what tools and facilities they used, they still designed and produced a web page. They are the ones who chose to use squarespace, and use that template, and be ok with the end result. It's not like a pizza shop or a hairdresser who never claimed that their very reason for existing and mission and product was accessibility. This is a completely topical and fair challenge.
- YurgenJurgensen 3y agoWhy did they need a WYSIWYG editor to lay out static content in an entirely standard format? That could be done in Markdown, or plain html. These have the advantage of being trivial to handle with accessibility layers.
- eadmund 3y ago> Did anyone else find the green background and the white text clash in a way that made it difficult to read? No, but only because with Javascript disabled there is literally nothing but an olive green page. Truly remarkable, given that it is supposed to be inclusive.
- wizzwizz4 3y agoObligatory: the most accessible font is usually a font your readers are already familiar with. This font looks distinctive, and personally I kinda like it, but it's not a magic wand you can wave over a document to make it more accessible.
- jraph 3y agoYeah, on the web, just use font-family: sans-serif (or, now that browsers don't systematically default to a serif font anymore, just nothing at all) and let the user see the default font, or the font they picked. It also improves everything else in contrast with a web font: it saves bandwidth and therefore cost, it saves page load time and therefore SEO and user retention. And it's not worse, nay better, than the font you arbitrarily picked. The default font needs to be dyslexic friendly on a dyslexic's computer if it's not already, and it should be the OS's job to ensure this. I am afraid there's no one size fits all wrt fonts and accessibility because I suspect different conditions have different requirements, so you can't pick yourself as a web designer. We indeed need dyslexic friendly fonts among others so dyslexic people can configure their devices with one that they like, fonts that are indeed actually proven as being effective as another commenter said. No proof: it didn't happen.
- flymasterv 3y agoThis font is yet another case of accessibility advocates entirely missing the point of web accessibility.
- madeofpalk 3y agoIs it actually? Or is it a font designer, who doesn't know much about 'accessibility' give it a go?
- YurgenJurgensen 3y agoBut letting the recipient’s browser decide means they wouldn’t be able to show everyone else how inclusive that are.
- 3y ago
- cybervegan 3y agoAny reason why "Pp" is missing from the typeface sampler?
- djxejms 3y ago[flagged]
- tomtomistaken 3y agoOh wow, the text is so much easier for me to read! Thanks for sharing!
- RobotToaster 3y agoAnother good font for this is OpenDyslexic https://opendyslexic.org/ https://opendyslexic.org/
- extra88 3y agoNot really. In studies, OpenDyslexic and other "dyslexia fonts" with exaggerated shapes didn't perform better than commonly used conventional fonts.
- gnicholas 3y agoI created a browser plugin that became pretty popular among readers with dyslexia, and we got a lot of requests for OD support. We added it and some people like it. My theory is that this relates partly to the increased kerning and the weight of the font (which makes a particularly big difference in combination with the color-based tech we use, since it makes the color more visible that way). I have seen that some dyslexia fonts don't seem to have an advantage from a population level, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful for some people. Unless there's evidence that people who think it's useful are actually being misled by their perception, I'd say it's not a bad idea to let people know it exists.
- seydor 3y agoIs there evidence that this is more legible? Because we don't read individual characters (but chunks) so making them individually distinguishable doesn't seem like it would have much of an effect.
- markhnthoraway 3y agoIn the part where the claim is made that individual characters matter there's a footnote link that ultimately goes to this PDF thesis[1]. That thesis has a claim itself: > Creating a well designed, legible typeface is therefore not about creating dissimilar characters; the aim must be to find, amongst other things, an optimal balance between uniformity and differentiation and, through that, to attain legibility At the end of the related chapter, where the author surveys some studies about letter and word recognition. It seems like the distinctions made in this font may be informed by that kind of perspective - not that increased differentiation of characters is good on its own. This is just at a glance but it seems there is at least a thread there to follow about evidence and reasoning. [1] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/40037679.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/40037679.pdf
- Terr_ 3y agoIt's probably the nostalgia talking, but I miss OCR-A.
- madeofpalk 3y agoThis font looks radically different on my two monitors, being significantly worse on my 'standard' DPI monitor compared to my other high DPI monitor. On my main, 1x monitor, the lowercase i has an anti-aliased "half pixel" at the bottom that extends past the baseline. A few other characters have this, but it's especially noticable on the lowcase i.
- csande17 3y agoThe font could definitely use some technical tweaking for issues like that -- the kerning on "qu" also stands out as a problem. It looks like this is the author's first attempt at making a font, though, and by that standard it's pretty good!
- porphyra 3y agoYes that "qu" kerning is a problem indeed, glad I wasn't the only one who noticed that. There are also some small technical typesetting issues in the samples, for example, by using straight quotes instead of true quotation marks in "Inclusive Feature 04". But yes if it's her first attempt then it's quite good and I hope that with some tweaks and improvements, it will be a really good font!
- microflash 3y agoIt does look pleasant to me. But the x-height is not large enough which makes it harder to be legible on smaller text sizes. Also, lack of additional weights discourages me to use it on any webpage. I'd have given it a shot if a bold weight were also present. Inter (with disambiguation features enabled) [1], Atkinson Hyperlegible [2], and IBM Plex Sans [3] are still better fonts to me. [1]: https://rsms.me/inter/ https://rsms.me/inter/ [2]: https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont [3]: https://www.ibm.com/plex/ https://www.ibm.com/plex/
- ClassyJacket 3y ago>Clear distinction between I, l and 1 The problem with that is that in this font, the l (lower case L) is just a vertical line. It's true there is a distinction between the 3, but seeing the l on its own you can't tell which it is.
- jjjjoe 3y agoWhere is the letter P in the second image?
- MaximilianEmel 3y agoThe `i' looks like an Inverted Exclamation Mark.